The 250th anniversary of America’s independence presents an opportunity to bridge our political divides rather than deepen them. This episode of Giving Ventures explores Be the People, a nationwide civic effort that aims to resurrect shared American ideals and foster community-driven solutions that last. Peter talks with Sarah Cross, senior vice president at Stand Together about how leveraging the 250th with storytelling and strategic partnerships can rekindle a collective American identity. Sarah breaks down practical ways philanthropists of all sizes can support this long-term movement and emphasizes that lasting change requires a bottom-up approach, with local communities driving the narrative and solutions.
Note: This transcript was generated and cleaned by AI.
Peter Lipsett: Ground us in some facts. What does the survey data actually say about how divided or not divided we actually are? Because all we hear about is how divided we are. But how true is that?
Sarah Cross: I think this is the best news of the whole conversation. We’re not nearly as divided as we seem. I’m pulling this from data from groups like More in Common and Populace. Populace is a think tank started by a neuroscientist named Todd Rose, spun out of Harvard. They do work on American private opinion, which is so often different than what people will say aloud publicly because of this highly divided, polarized, censorious environment that we’re in. And what that research just keeps finding again and again is that most of the division is coming from tiny factions on either ideological extreme that only represent at most 13 to 14 percent of the country. The vast majority of Americans fall in what you could think of as the exhausted majority in the middle. And that 13 to 14 percent is split between both sides, so really it’s like seven percent of each side.
Peter Lipsett: Well, and this is where it gets even more promising. That’s where the sides start to fade away and you start to see some real alignment around the principles that we’re celebrating in this 250th year.
Sarah Cross: Real alignment around the ideals best articulated in the Declaration of Independence. I’m talking about mass agreement around the value and importance of individual rights and individual liberties. I’m talking about agreement around even what we reject. Americans across the ideological spectrum actually reject equal outcomes as a goal and adhere to a commitment to equal rights.
Again, from Populace — the think tank I just mentioned — I’d encourage everyone to check out the American Aspirations Index and the Success Index. The first found mass agreement on eight of the ten issues when Americans were asked what they aspire to for the future of the country, and mass agreement in the latter piece of research on how Americans define their American dream. Americans across all demographics put the idea of contribution — rolling up our sleeves together in community to build a better future — as a critical part of their American dream, and something that isn’t as fulfilled as they would like to see.
So you roll all of that up together: we’ve got more in common than what divides us, we share the core ideals of the Declaration of Independence, and we want to work together to apply those ideas.
Peter Lipsett: What is that aspiration? Is it just working together? Is it just being friends? Or is there an end game?
Sarah Cross: What is that end game for America that so many people seem to agree on? It’s solving problems. It’s actually improving communities. You mentioned I’ve got a background in free speech and bridging divides. What we kept finding in our philanthropy in support of that work is that you only get so far when you just promote dialogue across lines of difference. What really works, and what builds lasting and sticky bridges across those divides, is a commitment to a common goal and the shared work of building a better future toward that goal.
Peter Lipsett: So chicken-and-egg problem, because I want to get into what Be the People is, but I also want to explore why Stand Together cares. Maybe we can mash those together. Give us the big picture description of what Be the People is — and you may even have to say a little bit about what Stand Together is.
Sarah Cross: Yeah, maybe I start there actually, because part of why Stand Together was so excited to create Be the People is because this is a chance to really shift culture toward the ideals that we were founded upon and that we exist to advance. I’m talking about a belief in everyone’s inherent dignity, the idea that everyone has something to contribute to the future of the country, and the idea of mutual benefit — that we’re all better off when we work to improve the lives of others.
That idea of contribution and mutual benefit, the idea that everybody matters to the future, is the idea behind Be the People. So you take that conversation we just had about the research, and you can start to see an opportunity that exists uniquely in this moment that gave rise to the initiative. If majorities of Americans actually want this thing and believe in this thing but just think that no one else wants it — and our problem is this big collective lie that we’re living in — then what you need is a mass revelation of the true story of us.
This reveal is the platform of Be the People, which says: what it means to be American in a year when we’re all asking that question is to contribute, to build a better future. It doesn’t mean we don’t have problems, but what we do as Americans is roll up our sleeves together and fix those problems.
So Be the People is a platform to connect the millions of Americans who are contributing — and who want to contribute — with the opportunities, the causes, and the organizations and leaders in community to do so. It’s part storytelling campaign, it’s part incredible coalition — which we can get into later — of organizations and individuals all committed to that ideal. And it’s undergirded, now and over the next 10 years as we build it, by an ecosystem of digital tools, technology, content, and curricula that will actually knit people together between those opportunities and needs.
Peter Lipsett: All right, let me ask the cynical question. That work — a lot of that work is already happening, right? It’s the thing that’s not getting appreciated. So is this a Ferris Bueller moment? Is Stand Together just jumping in front of the parade? What is the value add here? I presume there’s some kind of magnifying capability, but if the work’s already happening, what are you bringing to the table?
Sarah Cross: I’m glad you asked that question, because that really is kind of the core goal — not to compete with the great organizational work that’s happening out there already in communities, but really to define heroism and patriotism on those terms, to create a national platform that elevates the stories that are otherwise going unheard or are not breaking through with enough velocity and enough reach to drown out the super loud voices coming from those ideological extremes we talked about.
One of the many things that gave birth to this initiative was that Stand Together has been doing work to support community leaders for decades. There are so many great organizations out there that are telling the story, doing this work, but they don’t have access to best-in-class creative talent. They don’t have access on their own to the level of reach needed to tell a story on this scale and with this volume. And what we kept hearing from them again and again is they’re not sufficiently connected to each other. They feel alone in their work in communities or on the national stage, and they want to be learning from and bolstered by others across sectors outside of their space who are committed to the same ideals. So at the heart of Be the People is that partnership platform.
The national leadership council of these organizations — these individual leaders in culture — are bonding together to sing from the same songbook at the same time.
Peter Lipsett: Talk a little bit more about how you get the leaders to actually work together. So this is an issue, right? The Independent Institute out in California has a terrific Beyond Homelessness initiative. And one of the things I know — we’ve had them on the show and talked to them a lot about the work they’re doing — and they talk about how in San Francisco there are so many groups working in the homeless and poverty space out there, but none of them talk to each other. And that’s a microcosm of the rest of the country. These people are on the ground, they’re helping people day to day, and that’s an all-day, every-day kind of job. So I can understand how they get disconnected. How do you actually get them to take 10 minutes out of their day to use a platform, to get them connected, to actually appreciate what somebody else is doing?
Sarah Cross: I’ll answer that in a couple of ways — first at the national level, and then give an example of how that can manifest locally. Because I think a lot of that work is the work to be done over the next 10 years once we launch this platform and kind of shatter the lie that I mentioned.
At the national level, we’ve got groups in this coalition like Giving Tuesday, Goodwill, and Habitat for Humanity — organizations that have both nationally recognizable brands but also a footprint in communities around the country. 85 percent of Americans live within 10 miles of a Goodwill. There’s 4-H, there are businesses like Walmart involved. And then you couple that with leaders in entertainment, arts, and culture who have incredible platforms and audiences already following them. Think NFL athletes like Demario Davis, think leagues like the NBA, think best-in-class filmmakers like Brian Grazer and Imagine Entertainment. They’re all coming together.
The pretty simple value proposition is bringing them into community with each other. You have the storytellers who are saying, ‘I want the stories from communities on the ground.’ And then you’ve got the ground game organizations saying, ‘I’ve got an embarrassment of riches in stories of impact, but I don’t have platforms to get them out there.’ There’s going to be all kinds of work to better connect them with each other and do that amplification, but for now Be the People is that opportunity.
So two quick examples — one from within the National Leadership Council and then a local one. Giving Tuesday: most people know it as the hashtag that happens right after Thanksgiving where you’re called to be generous in your donations after you’ve gorged yourself on turkey and Black Friday deals. They already reach 40 million Americans a year with that campaign. They’ve already got community leaders in two-thirds of counties across the country who are hungry to do more and who are part of this movement in a sustained way. They see a path over the next five years to reaching 100 million Americans a year and ultimately having sustained community leadership in every county in the country.
What they lack is a platform with enough marketing reach to claim another day on the calendar, to create another American ritual. That’s part of what we’re going to help them do. We’re supporting their work to launch Together Tuesday, which is going to create a summertime civic summer ritual around contributing — volunteer-based, but across the spectrum of volunteering, not just serving in your soup kitchen, but mentoring, building and starting businesses — all of the great things we can do together. It is in partnership with Be the People and the amplification from all of those groups coming together to promote their work that they can achieve that reach and broaden the kind of contribution they’re bringing to bear.
Then you think about how this can manifest locally. We’ve started some early experiments, and they’re exactly that — experiments — but it gets to the kind of cohesion question you asked. We brought together the NBA and their NBA Cares program with Habitat for Humanity. They put on, under the banner of Be the People, a ‘Be the People Who Rebuild LA After the Wildfires’ event. We paired them up with local influencers that we sourced and identified who have reach and credibility in the LA area — really locally and authentically — and who have real connections to the crisis, the problem. Their lives were personally affected by the wildfires.
When you brought them together, they were all able to get farther faster than they otherwise would have. Habitat put up hundreds more walls than they otherwise would have to build the homes. They saw a boost in volunteerism. Be the People saw tremendous followership and got incredible stories after that. And then coming out of it — we’ve seen this in each of the towns where we’ve tried a model like this — the groups go, ‘My God, we have to do this kind of work together more often. We should have been talking to each other long before now. Let’s do this again and again.’
Peter Lipsett: So how do you avoid the — and I want to come back to what Stand Together is because there are certainly plenty of people who — I mean, heck, I used to work under what is now Stand Together. I’m going to put you to the test and ask you to define it, and then I’ll see what I can improve upon.
Sarah Cross: But how do you avoid the coding — the left-right coding? Stand Together is viewed as a Charles Koch thing, therefore of the right. You have the MacArthur Foundation and the NBA — these are not things that people would code to the right; there’s more of a liberal valence to them probably. But how do you avoid that political valence covering it all and creating the divide on the front end? Because it sounds like once people are in the room together, you get to a better spot. But you’ve got to get them there.
Peter Lipsett: Yeah, no, I really appreciate that question because it was really the most important imperative for creating that coalition.
Sarah Cross: Our goal was to not be bipartisan but be nonpartisan. This whole thing is about creating a sense of empowerment and agency for people to feel within communities. You matter. Your contribution makes a difference in the future of the country. Civil society is, we think, the most important part of what drives progress in society. Solutions don’t come top-down from government — they come from leaders within communities. So the whole coalition was built to be apolitical and to elevate those voices.
And then to be diverse in every sense of the word — not just observable diversity, but everything from socioeconomic diversity, ideological diversity, rural-urban spread, every faith, race, and creed. The whole thing needed to feel like an invitation to that 85 percent of Americans in the exhausted majority. Together, this constellation of brands and organizations has the reach to deliver on that, and the standing — when they stand together — to show the power of what communities can accomplish.
This coalition will continue to grow over time. We very deliberately brought together foundations across the ideological spectrum — that was very much by design. It’s by design that we’re working with organizations like Goodwill and 4-H that carry no political valence whatsoever.
This is also a choice because of how we want to be positioned in this moment in the 250th year. There are competing narratives from either of the extremes. There are national platforms through Congress and the administration and the government who are telling a story of the role that they see government playing in the future of the country. But we wanted to make sure that the civil society voice came together and had a part of that conversation — not just now but for the next ten years.
Peter Lipsett: All right, so let’s put a pin on that because I keep teasing we’re going to define Stand Together. So let’s define it, and then I want to come back to the next ten years and also some of these competing voices. Stand Together — how do you define it? How should people think about it?
I was only half kidding about making you go first. We have worked together for years. The first time we worked together, I was an employee of Koch Companies Public Sector. You were at Koch Foundation. You eventually joined us under the Freedom Partners banner. Then I left and went to DonorsTrust in 2014. The organization changed names twice since then, and now it is Stand Together. It’s merged the Charles Koch Institute, pieces of the foundation, the seminar network that I was a part of, and new things on top of all of that. It’s a lot.
Sarah Cross: Stand Together is organized as a philanthropic community, all dedicated to that North Star vision that I mentioned — this idea that everyone has something to contribute, and that we all lead better, more fulfilling lives when we’re living in service to others or to create value for others. We exist as a philanthropic community to get rid of the barriers between those people and their full potential, between them and that contribution in communities. So we’re a constellation of investment organizations — and I say organizations because some of them are philanthropic and charitable, some of them are for-profit. Sometimes the best, most effective way to drive social change is to invest in good businesses that are doing work for good.
We are a community of, at any given time, more than 500 business leaders and individuals who are investing in that vision and committing to the organizations that we support. And then we’re a suite of horizontal shared services — everything from communications and analytics to development — that ensure we’re equipped to come alongside a social entrepreneur, somebody with a solution to a problem, and can bring whatever kind of resources and capabilities to bear necessary to scale that solution. The actual individual issues that we use to direct and focus our resources change dynamically in the face of a changing world.
Peter Lipsett: Okay, so let’s pull the pin out and come back to this landscape of different groups out there and also just the time horizon. This is the 250th year. You only get one 250th.
Sarah Cross: Right. And really it seems to me so much momentum is building. We’re talking in weeks at this point. By the time this airs — I think we’re going to drop this on June 9th — it’s less than a month away until we get to the Fourth. The big celebration, the big kahuna, which is very nicely on a Saturday this year. Very convenient.
Peter Lipsett: So you have America 250, which has been around for a long time. All the states have their 250 commissions. The Trump administration has its Freedom 250 initiative with all kinds of things — some of it related, some doing its own thing. And then you have all these different groups out there building curricula or building programs and projects around it. It’s frankly hard. We at DonorsTrust have tried to parse some of this and got a little stymied just doing that — it’s too much and it also feels like it’s not enough. So how do you make sense of that landscape? And where does Be the People fit into it?
Sarah Cross: I think the first thing to emphasize is that right from the get-go, Be the People was always designed as a long-term culture-shifting effort. We always saw the 250th as a key inflection point — that moment we mentioned up top where everyone’s asking the question of what it means to be American, which offers us a moment of focus that is otherwise really hard to achieve, even with all the paid media dollars in the world.
Quick tangent — the last time, really, as a country where we had a conversation about who we are at the same time was after 9/11. It’s usually something we do in reaction to a tragedy that you can’t predict. Very rarely is it something you can look ahead to, see coming, and plan for. So we wanted to harness that moment to be something that pulled so many of these organizations together — who we knew were going to be doing things for the 250th anyway — to tell the same story at the same time in a breakthrough way.
But as I mentioned, the beating heart of the work is in the partnerships, the community organizations, the people who are out there in culture telling the stories. The strategy over the 10-year period is built as a flywheel — a virtuous cycle between the stories and the action on the ground. The more that we tell this story of the American spirit as alive and well, as an invitation to others, the more people are going to take action in communities. The more they take action in communities, the more stories we have, and it churns from there.
The other piece to call out with the long-term horizon in mind is the investment in the digital ecosystem of tools to enable this. There’s a moment to, in so many ways, rebuild our civic infrastructure — rebuild or innovate and build from scratch with the incredible new technologies out there today — the tools it takes to connect somebody’s interests and passions with the groups and causes that need them.
On the question about the landscape, we could go deep on all the back-and-forth that’s been pretty heavily reported across the Wall Street Journal, the Times, every paper out there. I’d sum it all up by saying the governmental efforts around the 250th are the kind of thing that led to the celebration many people saw back during the bicentennial and led to the creation of a lot of content, programs, and ideas that are still enduring today. I mean, we probably both know Schoolhouse Rock, which came out of the bicentennial era.
I think there were aspirations to build something lasting from this, but there were a lot of starts and stops in the ten-year lead-up, and the national platforms weren’t in many cases able to get off the ground and weren’t always collaborative with each other — which to us created a vacuum and an opportunity. There are great programs being put out there, many of them by state leaders who stepped up to fill that void, and great celebrations. The celebration aspect will happen. It’s the endurance that’s the question. Someone’s got to invest in sustaining the impact for the years afterward, and that’s where we saw an opportunity. We’re built for the long term.
Peter Lipsett: I’ve heard several leaders — both of us know Victoria Hughes, who has been involved in this America 250 — express concern, or really just the question: how do you make this keep going? What’s the plan? We’ve been thinking a lot about that at DonorsTrust and are going to announce some things we’re trying to do on that front. But this is a huge effort. It’s a ten-year effort. How do you make sure the energy doesn’t flag? I mean, come July 5th, people can be like, ‘Well, that was fine. I gotta drive back from the beach, clean up these fireworks, and it’s all done.’ By December 31st, the calendar flips, it’s the 251st, nobody cares. How do you keep that energy up in 2029 and 2030 and 2031?
Sarah Cross: I’m going to answer that in two ways. One, I’m going to selfishly take the opportunity to talk about how we’ll measure success, because I think part of the answer is that we’re going to learn as we go. So much of what we’re building on the front end of this is the actual learning apparatus to keep our finger on the pulse of what Americans demand and want and need — and to be positioned as a platform to go meet those needs.
But another way is through the exciting work of the individual organizations themselves. Another example from the Stand Together universe — an organization you might be aware of — it’s called CarePortal.
Peter Lipsett: My church is involved with that. Yeah, great.
Sarah Cross: I’m passionate about their work. They help kids in situations like what I grew up in. For those who aren’t familiar, they’re a platform that connects social workers with real needs that families have — needs that, if not met, lead to family separations and terrible outcomes, more kids entering the foster care system than anyone thinks is ideal — and pairs those needs with churches, people in faith institutions across the community who want to help but just don’t know that need exists.
CarePortal sees an opportunity, thanks to the platform and amplification of partnership with Be the People, to go from serving 250,000 families a year to serving a million families a year. And we’ll hold ourselves accountable to helping deliver that value. So part of how you sustain the momentum is to keep coming back and telling that story over time. Have we gone from reaching 250,000 to a million a year? That’s a million real lives with incredible stories in each of them, and we will continuously tell those stories.
I’d love to also go into the measurement piece. One of my favorite Charles Koch quotes is, ‘The future is unknown and unknowable.’ When you’ve got 10 years to deal with, there’s a lot of unknown out there. We would never attempt to engineer a rigid 10-year plan. We know it’s going to change. We know our first couple of years being in community with millions of Americans at a time is going to teach us something, and what we build from here will be based on those learnings.
So what we’ve designed is a couple of instruments to know whether or not we’re getting there. We’re partnering with Gallup to track longitudinally, over that 10-year time horizon, whether we’re actually increasing the American spirit. Do more Americans think that we’re equipped to solve our own problems? We’re aiming to reverse a Pew statistic that still keeps me up at night. It’s been tracked for decades, but for the first time in the last five years it found that fewer than half of Americans believe we can solve our own problems anymore. When you don’t think you can solve your own problems, you’re a whole lot more susceptible to ugly ideas from top-down forces.
Peter Lipsett: Who are they thinking is going to solve the problem? Because there are still problems. You still have to solve them. They’re still there. Somebody’s got to do it.
Sarah Cross: Exactly. So we’ll measure our progress against that and keep the momentum going that way. And I want to come back to this digital ecosystem piece. Forgive the quick tangent here, but I think it’s a good story. Right now, if you want to contribute — and this is not a failing of any one organization, just no one’s invested in this technology — you have to go Google the charities. You can put in your zip code and get a list of registered 501(c)(3)s and charities in your area, but then you’ve got to do the legwork to figure out which of these align to your interests, which are in good standing, which have needs that have anything to do with what you have to offer. And that’s a lot of legwork for busy Americans.
So Be the People as a web platform will be that matching function. So like, you can say you want to help children in need, and here’s a great organization like CarePortal — some stories of the work they’re doing, how you can help, what kind of contribution they’re looking for.
The story piece comes from a partner in our universe who told us what it meant to him to start Stripe, a payment processing platform. Stripe transformed the entrepreneurship landscape — it suddenly made it easier for people to start businesses. They no longer needed to figure out all these highly technical things that most people don’t know how to do. That’s a good in and of itself and it transformed a critical sector in civil society. But the most powerful thing to come out of it was this front-line view into what businesses people were starting and why — what was succeeding or not, what American consumers were demanding that entrepreneurs were trying to meet. If you’re an investor, that’s invaluable information about American interests and needs.
I think the Be the People platform over that 10-year time horizon can be a similar engine of transformation and progress in the social sector. The most valuable thing this platform is going to do is to learn in a very direct, hyper-local way: what problems are Americans passionate about solving? Who are they working with to do it? Where are they having a good experience? Where are they not having their needs met? And what does that mean about gaps in the landscape that we as philanthropists can create innovative mechanisms to address?
Peter Lipsett: Well, and I think that storytelling piece is so important. One of my soapbox things is I feel so many people — we’ve seen this decline in charitable giving across the board, just slowly inching down every year. And behind the data you see that it’s not collapsing, but that’s because the big donors are giving more and the small donors are literally disappearing. My working theory is just that people feel that if all they’ve got is $100 or $10, it’s not going to move the needle. They’ve got their own needs, and they’re going to let Bezos or Gates or Charles Koch go spend that money. And those donors do step up.
Sarah Cross: So it actually is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you can tell the story and show that $25 on CarePortal saved this kid, and here’s the woman who looks just like you and why she did it — is that kind of the idea of the storytelling piece?
Peter Lipsett: Yeah, exactly. And we’re already finding thousands of them. That’s part of the ask to our partners — go find those stories and bring them in our direction, and we’ll invest the creative resources it takes to bring those to the masses through social and through these incredible influential people who are on the council with us.
Sarah Cross: But here’s the cynic again. People flock like moths to a flame toward bad news. You actually have to change some cultural muscle memory for people to actually seek out the good news and want to pause briefly in their Instagram feed to actually hear the happy story instead of just the person complaining about how they got burned at Starbucks or whatever their complaint of the day is. How do you do that?
Peter Lipsett: You know, I keep going back to the National Leadership Council. A huge part of it is through trusted and beloved messengers. When it’s your favorite NFL athlete sharing that story, you listen. We’ve seen that. Stand Together has a partnership with the NFL through My Cause My Cleats. And when the stories come out from those athletes about the organizations that were supported, the response is tremendous. The growth and followership and, frankly, just the relief from people when they see this as an antidote to what they’re absolutely sick of in their feeds currently — it’s early days in Be the People, but even what we’re finding so far is showing more of that trend. That Habitat and NBA story — the level of organic growth that we got without putting much in the way of paid dollars behind it yet. We’ll eventually put paid dollars behind the social push on these stories, but we just keep hearing this is absolutely unheard-of organic growth.
Sarah Cross: And interaction with the platform. Not talking bots — we’re talking about people who are getting on there and talking to the social entrepreneurs, talking back to the platform, and just saying again and again: this is what we’re hungry for, this is what we need. If I can click on this and watch it for 15 seconds and change my algorithm, I feel like I’ve been empowered to do something — even a small thing — that changes how I relate to the world.
Peter Lipsett: And the post-testing is really exciting — the degree to which people say they feel empowered to go make a difference after viewing just one or two pieces of content like that.
Okay, so two final questions to land the plane. One: talk to us about what we are going to see. I know the effort kind of formally launched earlier in the year, but you’ve got some stuff coming up in the near term. Where are people going to see Be the People out in the world? I don’t want to spoil all of this — I’m pretty sure this podcast will drop right as it’s about to enter the world.
Sarah Cross: So everybody listening is going to get a little sneak peek, and I’ll ask all of your followers to keep it to themselves for maybe one week after they hear this. As you would expect for a storytelling platform designed to be meaningful in culture, we’ll go to market, we’ll go to the American people through culture. It’ll be a very musical launch.
We have already produced and recorded an anthemic song by one of the most famous and prolific producers active in the music industry today — a bona fide hitmaker. And by design, we’re releasing this song through an open call to the American people. We’re not trying to have a bunch of celebrities record a ‘We Are the World’ for the 250th. We’re really putting it out there to the people to make the anthem their own. We’ll have 100-plus popular creators across all the musical genres putting their remixes out at the moment of drop in mid-June. And then there’ll be an invitation to communities around the country for people to do their own version, or — if they’re not musically inclined — to nominate an unsung hero in their community whose story needs to be told.
And then rather than trying to compete with any of the single big celebratory moments on the Fourth of July, over the summer we’ll roll it out at festivals all across the country. What you could expect to find in a town like Austin or Nashville is a music festival, kind of a civic street fair vibe, that families can show up to — listen to music from one of their favorite creators or artists who will show up under the Be the People banner — and then this is where the civic street festival piece comes in: there’ll be booths everywhere, a join-fair kind of model where your invitation is to go find a cause to get involved with. Here are all of the great organizations already active in your community. We’ll hand them a passport — if you go to these booths and take an action with these groups, you get swag and merch. Everyone loves swag and merch.
Peter Lipsett: Our DonorsTrust hats fly. We can’t hang on to them.
Sarah Cross: So it’ll create that groundswell feel of a civic season — celebration of the moment, but more importantly our commitment from every American who participates to building that better future. And then we’ll take it from there with the stories.
Peter Lipsett: All right, well that’ll be exciting. It’ll be nice to see it out there and live. Okay, final question. There’s a lot of money behind this effort already. This show really is targeted at philanthropists across the board, so the cynic coming through again: where are philanthropic dollars actually best leveraged from the general giver base — whether they be $100 or $100,000 or $100 million? Where are they best placed in this effort? Is there a 501(c)(3) they’re giving to? Are they giving to their community? How are they using their philanthropy to help move this forward?
Sarah Cross: Thank you for asking that question, because we’ve still got a ways to go. This is an ambitious effort and it’s going to take significant resources now and over the next ten years to make it possible. We’re incredibly grateful to the dozens of individual partners who have made this possible, the incredible foundations who are stepping up, groups like Stand Together who are taking some risks on the front end. But we’re actually only a little over halfway toward our $250 million goal through 2026 for launch.
We benefit from the reach of the incredible partners in the National Leadership Council, and yet to break through the noise, there’s going to have to be significant investment on the front end. That digital ecosystem takes investment to build, and it will serve the effort for the next ten years. There is an independent 501(c)(3) set up to house Be the People that will drive the creative and the campaign, that digital ecosystem of tools and products, and the platform of partnerships for the next 10 years — and I invite everyone to consider supporting there.
I just want to keep coming back to what I hope has been a thread throughout this entire conversation: the beating heart of this effort is the work locally in communities. This all has to ladder up to a shared national story of who we are as Americans. We become the story that we tell. We need to make sure that the story of who we are from the 250th and beyond is in terms of what we build together and the problems that we solve together. That’s important, but that actual work happens locally, it happens bottom-up, it happens in communities. Philanthropists of all sizes across the country are invited to lead in that local way.
Tell us what’s going on in your town and community that needs to be elevated through this platform. Help make your community a Be the People exemplar community. Connect us to the great organizations already doing exciting work there. In a lot of ways, we’re not asking you to give differently — we’re asking you to give in community, with a group that can help make this a movement that shapes our future.
Peter Lipsett: Well put. I love it. It’s a big idea. It’s an exciting idea, and it’s so important in this year. I just don’t want to see this celebration and this milestone get squandered and go to waste. I want to see some momentum coming out of it. So Be the People and the work of Stand Together is really important to that. Sarah Cross, thank you so much.
Sarah Cross: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Peter Lipsett: I really appreciate Sarah joining us. Thanks to our friends at Stand Together for letting us use this cool studio — if you’re watching on YouTube, Stand Together is great because they think big. And this Be the People effort is a great example of that. So important in this time when it is going to be wonderful to celebrate the semiquincentennial — but we’ve got to keep that momentum going. We have to keep bending the curve on this divisiveness in America. I’m excited to see what Be the People and the myriad of organizations under that — ones familiar to you from your community, ones familiar through civics — what they all accomplish together. So can you. You can be a part of it as well, even without necessarily changing your giving habits, but nudging people to help bring these things together and to think bigger about how they can work together to change America.
If you want to change America, that is what we help philanthropists across the country do at DonorsTrust. And we would be thrilled to help you if we are not already doing so. Go to donorstrust.org, download some materials, send us a message. We’d love to have a conversation with you if you care about limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise. That’s what we do, that’s what we care about, and we’d love to help you maximize the impact of your giving. We have more great conversations coming up on so many topics where you as a donor can have an impact. Until then, thank you for being a giver. We’ll talk more soon.
